The role of faith in the psychotherapeutic context

The focus of this article is the role of faith in psychotherapy. It is suggested that the psychotherapeutic endeavor may be fruitfully informed by insights from other disciplines. The theologian Paul Tillich's view of faith is discussed as it applies to the psychotherapeutic endeavor. The relation between faith and anxiety is explored in the context of the problem of resistance and change in psychotherapy. The work of theorists from various perspectives (existential, analytic) is discussed in the light of Tillich's view of faith.     

Comments on two recent methods for analyzing the psychotherapeutic process

The Psychological Record -     

The role of surprise in the attribution process

Abstract

We report five studies which compared two theories linking surprise to causal attribution. According to the attributional model, surprise is frequently caused by luck attributions, whereas according to the expectancy-disconfirmation model, surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation and stimulates causal thinking. Studies 1 to 3 focused on the question of whether surprise is caused by luck attributions or by unexpectedness. In Studies 1 and 2, subjects had to recall success or failure experiences characterised by a particular attribution (Study 1) or by low versus high surprisingness (Study 2), whereas in Study 3, unexpectedness and luck versus skill attributions were independently manipulated within a realistic setting. The main dependent variables were unexpectedness (Studies 1 and 2), degree of surprise (Studies 1 and 3), and causal attributions (Study 2). The results strongly suggest that surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation, whereas luck attributions are neither sufficient nor necessary for surprise. Studies 4 and 5 addressed the question of whether surprise stimulates attributional thinking, again using a remembered-incidents technique. The findings of the previous studies were replicated, and it was confirmed that surprising outcomes elicit more attributional search than unsurprising ones. Additional results from Study 5 suggest that causal thinking is also stimulated by outcomes that are both negative and important.     

Limits of symhedonia: the differential role of prior emotional attachment in sympathy and sympathetic joy

Seven studies tested the hypothesis that compared with sympathy symhedonia (sympathy for another's good fortune) is inherently more contingent on prior emotional attachment to its targets. As predicted, Studies 1-4 found that reported attachment was higher for past episodes of symhedonia than for those of sympathy and that recalled incidence of sympathy exceeded that of symhedonia when the target was a stranger. Study 5 showed that whereas symhedonia was significantly higher for high- versus low-attachment targets sympathy was not. Study 6 found that sympathy is more likely than symhedonia when a relationship is strained. Study 7 found that both sympathy and symhedonia are weaker for nonclose (vs. close) others, but the disparity is significantly smaller for sympathy than for symhedonia.     

Reflections on the process of psychotherapeutic change as applied to medical situations

This article takes the basic ideas on the process of changing implicit knowledge put forward in this special issue, and extends them beyond psychotherapy to include other therapeutic relationships that occur in medicine. One vignette, from an encounter between a medical student and a dying patient, illustrates how a “moment of meeting” changes the student as well as the patient. The second shows how therapeutic interventions for new mothers with their newborn infants involve “moments of meeting” that alter the mother's implicit knowledge of her baby and of herself as a mother. © 1998 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

The role of goal specificity in the goal-setting process

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between goal specificity and task performance, with specificity operationalized as a continuous quantitative variable reflecting the range of performance levels individuals chose as their personal goals. It was hypothesized that, controlling for goal difficulty, specific personal goals would be associated with higher levels of task performance. It was also hypothesized that task strategy would mediate the relationship between goal specificity and performance and that specific goals would be associated with smaller goal-performance discrepancies. The results from a sample of 162 college students working on an eye-hand coordination task supported the hypothesis concerning goal-performance discrepancies. They hypotheses regarding task strategy and the relationship between goal specificity and performance were supported only on the second of two trials.